I imagine the phone call…the knock on the door. He was in an accident. He didn’t make it.

I imagine…him falling asleep and not waking up…alcohol poisoning…

I imagine how life will be. When he is gone. I think about the stress and worry that will suddenly be lifted off of me…

I imagine the grief and sorrow that will consume the girls and I for awhile…then the relief that will come slowly…

I imagine what life will be like when I don’t have to live with an alcoholic. When my girls don’t…when they can have friends over without having to worry how drunk daddy is…how angry he will get when they want to watch a movie in the living room…how embarrassed they will be when he starts slurring words, then passes out wherever he lands…

I imagine life without him. We have tried life without him while he was still around. I have tried to keep him away…only to take him back with the promise of no more drinking…or when life just got too hard for me to do on my own…or when I felt guilty for not standing by him no matter what…

It didn’t work. The only way out of this life is for him to be gone. The only way to spare the girls…the only way for me to be free…is for him to be gone.

I stopped imagining it…and started praying for it. God, please take him. This is more than I can handle…This is too much for my girls…It hurts too much…

He had answered a prayer like that for me before…Someone who had hurt me…He took him before that man could hurt my not yet born, but imagined, children. God did that for me, I know with all of my heart. There is no doubt in my mind that He did that…for me…for my girls that were to come…

And, surely, God could do that for us again…surely He doesn’t intend for us to live in this pain…He can’t mean for my girls to grow up like this…

Right? So, just take him…because I can’t do this anymore…My girls can’t go through anymore…Please God, please take him…

I never said it…out loud…but I thought it…I prayed it…I pleaded with God to take him…To pull the girls and I out of this life that I know He didn’t intend for us to live.

I wondered what I was doing wrong…Well, I was doing a lot wrong…but not that wrong…I wasn’t THAT bad of a person that I should be punished for this long…that I should have to hurt for this long…So I begged and pleaded and prayed more…

When my husband decided not to go to rehab a second time, I was confused. He changed…he was trying…My anger was still there…but my prayers started changing…

It was a slow change…And there were still days when that old prayer played in my mind…then those days started getting less frequent…God started pulling at my heart…telling me that was not the answer.

I didn’t let go of it easily. Because living with a recovering alcoholic is not easy. Life didn’t all of a sudden get wonderful. It was hard work. Some days harder than I cared to try…

I didn’t stop hating him as quickly as I thought I should have…and I was angry about that. I didn’t understand how he could change so much more quickly than I was able to. I didn’t understand that it was time for me to forgive him…to start at least…

I was still thinking of how much easier it would be without him.

And we don’t say that…out loud…but we say it…in our minds, in our dreams, even sometimes in our prayers…and we aren’t alone in those thoughts…those dreams…those prayers…

And I need to know I’m not alone in those thoughts…I am not the only one who had those awful, depraved, selfish thoughts. And I need to say that I had them. And that I lived through them. That my husband lived through them.

That there is another side…and it took us 17 years to get to that other side…And it may be 37 years for someone else…or 17 months…But it is possible to get there. To be where I was…to have the thoughts I had and to now be where I am…It’s possible.